Pelosi: 'We will not cut off funding' for Iraq

Tom Curry National affairs writer • Profile • E-mail

WASHINGTON - Incoming House Speaker Nancy Pelosi had a message Tuesday for voters who elected a Democratic Congress last month hoping it would force President Bush to bring U.S. troops home from Iraq.

“We will not cut off funding for the troops,” Pelosi said. “Absolutely not,” she said.

A reporter had asked Pelosi if the new Democratic-controlled Congress would vote to end the funding of the war if Democrats were unable to persuade President Bush to change his Iraq strategy.

“Let me remove all doubt in anyone’s mind; as long as our troops are in harm’s way, Democrats will be there to support them, but… we will have oversight over that funding,” she said.

She spoke to reporters as she took a break from a briefing Democratic House members were getting from former Clinton administration official Richard Holbrooke and other foreign policy veterans.

“None of us want to fail; none of us want to see Iraq as a failure,” said incoming Majority Leader Steny Hoyer of Maryland.

A political risk for 2008?
Is there a danger that Pelosi and Hoyer will disappoint voters who’ve just elected the new Congress, expecting it would take steps to end the war?

Yes — there’s a big danger, said Rep. Dennis Kucinich, D- Ohio and other Democrats who oppose the war.

Kucinich said the Democrats have only one way to end the war: vote against the $130 billion Iraq war supplemental spending bill that will be on the House floor in the spring.

“We vote it down,” Kucinich said, and Bush would be forced to end the war.

He indicated that he didn’t yet have the votes he’d need to defeat the spending bill, but “this is a work in progress.” The decision on the spending bill “absolutely is going to be the key vote,” Kucinich said.

Addressing the newly elected Democratic House members, he said, “If new members came in here on the expectation that they’re going to help end the war, and then they vote to appropriate $130 billion, they might find difficulty going back home and explaining that. You can’t simultaneously say you oppose the war and then vote to fund it.”

Decision 2006: The newly elected Click here for a look at the new faces headed to the halls of Congress following the midterm elections of 2006. AP

In a memo he passed out to Democratic members, Kucinich said, “The voters will not forget who let them down” if Congress chooses to keep funding the war.

Is it the Democrats' war too?
“This war is not only the president’s,” he said. “This war belongs to Congress as well, to Democrats and Republican alike….”

He predicted that “Democrats will be held accountable in the 2008 primaries…. The war will not go away as an issue. The Democratic base will make sure of it.”

Another anti-war Democrat, Rep. Jim McGovern, D- Mass., said “I think we have two years to dramatically shift our policy in Iraq. If things two years from now are exactly the same as now, I don’t think voters are going to be forgiving.”

Meanwhile one newly elected Democrat is looking for a way to avoid having to vote on cutting off the money. “We better find another way to get this done other than cutting off funds,” said Nancy Boyda, a newly elected Democratic congresswoman from Kansas. “When President Bush said, ‘we’re not going to leave,’ I think he’s going to find a great deal of resistance by the American people.’”

Newly-elected House member Tim Walz from Minnesota said, “In my district I wasn’t hearing (during the campaign) an overall cry that the troops have to out by midnight tomorrow.” Instead he said voters want to see some plan on how to succeed in stabilizing Iraq.

Both Boyda and Walz will be high on GOP target lists in 2008: they each represent districts that supported Bush in 2004 and that had elected Republican House members for at least 10 years prior to 2006.

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